Kamala’s Comedown

After an exuberant summer, an autumn chill has descended on Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. The joyous rallies that were all over the news between mid-July, when Harris replaced Joe Biden atop the Democratic ticket, and the August convention, where she and Tim Walz accepted the party nomination, have quieted into more familiar spectacles. Her once-ascendant polling numbers have stalled and her campaign has become cautious, granting TV interviews mostly to a handful of local news channels in swing states. If the first month of her candidacy was an exhalation after the suffocating defeatism under Biden, the last weeks before Election Day have felt like a collective holding of breath.

It’s a stark reversal from those early days, when it felt like Democrats were finally, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez jokingly put it, “in disconcerting levels of array.” Donald Trump was spiraling, his panicked indignation seemingly confirming that replacing the 81-year-old Biden was a blow from which the Republicans might not recover. Now, as we enter the homestretch, Harris’s shocking and historic candidacy has become oddly — perhaps even perilously — normal. Beltway pundits will tell you that, in a country as polarized as the U.S., the race was always going to tighten into a photo finish. But it’s impossible to escape the conclusion that the Harris campaign has betrayed its original promise of unbridled possibility, the consequences of which will reverberate beyond November 5 regardless of who wins.

The change in the campaign was most recently on display during the vice-presidential debate. If anyone deserves credit for making J. D. Vance the least popular figure on either presidential ticket, it is Walz. He single-handedly changed the Democratic messaging about the GOP this past summer, casting Republicans as creepy zealots who won’t keep their noses out of women’s exam rooms. Weird became derisive shorthand for the conservative movement of which Vance — with his scorn for “cat ladies” who choose not to reproduce — was the smug, youthful face. “I can’t wait to debate the guy,” Walz quipped at the Philadelphia rally where Harris introduced the Minnesota governor as her running mate.

The actual debate saw a Walz who seemed terrified of defining his opponent as weird or anything else. Vance worked overtime to soften his image, masking his extremism on abortion — he has said he favors a national ban — with polite evasions and a polished delivery. Walz helped him by being distressingly cordial, emphasizing over and over again how much the two of them agreed on a host of issues. (Variations on “we agree” made more than a dozen appearances, according to NBC News.) The effect was to nicewash an authoritarian handmaiden who, as Vance made plain toward the end of the evening, still won’t admit that Trump lost the 2020 election.

It was apparent that the Harris campaign had backed away from its primary value-add: the promise that it would break with the politics of the past. In July, Harris proclaimed, “We are not going back,” coining a catchphrase that deftly turned the page on both Trump and Biden. But rather than exploit the range of realistic challenges to the status quo at her disposal, she has demonstrated a very narrow sense of the options before her.

In response to Republican smears casting her as America’s “border czar” responsible for a dysfunctional immigration system, Harris has pivoted rightward on the issue, promising a more restricted path for asylum seekers during a September trip to the U.S.-Mexico border. Were her campaign more confident, it would be hammering the fact that Trump and Vance inspired bomb threats that paralyzed Springfield, Ohio, by falsely accusing its Haitian residents of abducting and eating their neighbors’ pets. Instead, the Democratic response has been surprisingly muted, perhaps reflecting the same erroneous assumption Biden held as a candidate — that if voters were simply exposed to Trump’s racist behavior, they would reject him. Worse, the campaign exudes a fear that the Democrats are at a disadvantage when fighting a demagogue.

Harris’s deference to the status quo has been even more pronounced on foreign policy, which has been dominated by Israel’s grinding war in Gaza. If people on the left, and particularly young people on the left, harbored hopes that she would break with American dogma of supplying limitless support to Israel, those hopes have been dashed. She paid lip service to the need for a cease-fire and a two-state solution with Palestinians, but in the months since she took over the campaign, cease-fire talks between Israel and Hamas have collapsed; Israel has detonated pager bombs across Lebanon and assassinated Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah; and the Israel Defense Forces have gone to war in Lebanon, where they’ve killed at least 1,000, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry. All while the most basic requests of pro-Palestine activists, like having a Palestinian American state representative address the DNC, went ignored.

Israel’s brinkmanship is an issue in which Harris has failed to create meaningful daylight not only between herself and Trump but between herself and the unpopular Biden. The result will be her co-ownership of atrocities against Gazan civilians as well as further confirmation that, for all the history-making potential of her candidacy, we have seen these politics before.

Harris’s timid approach is clearly a correction of her failed 2020 presidential campaign, which saw her alienating the Democrats’ moderate base. But despite that campaign’s flaws, it was refreshingly open to embracing paradigm-shifting policy proposals, like Medicare for All. Gone today is that desire to broaden the horizon of political possibility — less “unburdened by what has been,” to borrow another of the vice-president’s mantras, than stubbornly chained to it. If her aim now is to embody change without seeming too radical, going out of her way to praise anti-Trump Republicans like Dick Cheney for their service to the country, she has not done nearly enough on the change front to energize the non-moderate voters she also needs.

Amid the muddle of her campaign message, strategists have apparently settled on a more modest proposition for what Harris can actually deliver: a rancor-free politics without Trump. Viewers responded to the amiable tone of the debate between Vance and Walz, rewarding both candidates with higher favorability ratings. “This debate just reminds people of what politics could be like if Trump was off the scene. What it was like before he came down the escalator — and what it might be like if he’s taken away on a conveyor belt,” a Democratic strategist told New York the night of the debate. Perhaps there is a real yearning for right-wingers like Vance to be treated as legitimate political figures. But selling nostalgia for a pre-Trump world raises the question of how Harris is any different from Biden.

It also sends the message that Democrats have failed to convince voters that Trump and his acolytes are beyond the pale. The clearest example of his normalization, besides his narrow deficit with Harris in national polling averages, is how trusted he remains on crime. A Leger survey published on October 1 showed that likely voters believe Trump would handle crime better than Harris, 53 percent to 47 percent. Harris is a former prosecutor. Trump was convicted of falsifying business records in 2016, presided over a record crime spike in 2020, sought to orchestrate a coup in 2021, and, in September, proposed a Purge-like free-for-all in which cops could assault people with impunity. It’s a testament to the difficulty of Harris’s task that her efforts to impose a “cop versus crook” frame on the election have fallen flat — people are better conditioned to see racist bluster as anti-crime than they are actual policing.

So what’s to be done about a political reality in which voters want the opposing forces of liberalism and authoritarianism to be reconciled? The answer, for Harris, increasingly resembles a paradox: stave off Trumpian calamity through politics as usual.